Mind Scheduling- 'Think About Your Thoughts'

Last week I attended an international students get-together that was conducted in our seminar hall. About hundred students from around twenty countries turned up to the event.Voices chattering in different languages and accents reverberated the packed hall. Then came the announcement -"Hello everyone..! Hope you all are having a very good time. Without any delay let us start our first round.The contest is 'Every one should give an impromptu speech on one of the famous tourist attractions of your country.' Places should not be repeated..!! "

Suddenly there was a deep silence. A tall boy with a professional attire in the very first row slowly walked to the podium."Good evening. My name is Thomas. I am from Brazil.The most visited place in Brazil is Rio de Janeiro, a huge seaside city. A 38m monolith granite statue of Christ attracts many tourists. The city is also known for its Carnival festivals",he orated. 

After a round of applause for the opener, a charming girl from China took over the stage.With a pleasant voice and thick accent of Chinese she said- " The Great Wall of China is one of the most visited places in my country.It is an awe-inspiring feat of ancient defensive architecture. Its winding path over rugged country and steep mountains forms a great scenery."

Wait..! Let me stop my fictional story here and ask you a couple of questions.

-When Brazilian was explaining about Rio,did you think about the seminar hall and the number of students? or you were just thinking about the description of statue? 

- When the girl was talking about Great wall of china, did you think about Rio?

  or was concentrating on her illustration of the wall.

I bet more than 95% of you answered yes to the second part of each question. Shortly I will explain you the reason. Here is a very interesting mind activity. If you do it honestly,I assure you love it. Close your eyes for 10 seconds and at a time try to think about both the places Rio and The Great wall.Visualize their images in your mind.

Are you simultaneously able to think about both of them? 

Are you able to imagine both the images at the same instant?

Even if your closed eye screen displays both images side by side , you have to flip your sight to only one at a time. Else you get images of them moving in and out of your sight in fraction of seconds giving you an illusion that you are thinking about both of them.

The obvious question from all of you. Why? Is there a meaning for this activity? Why is this useful? Because to drive home the point- 'Human brain can think about ONE and Only ONE thing at an instant of time'

Oh..! Is it? Great.Interesting. But why for me? What can I do now by knowing this? 

If these are your questions let me answer by making a quick comparison between Human BRAIN and the Computer CPU. We put Gmail in one tab,Facebook in other, Google search as a default in another. Along with them we play music, work on MS office,watch movies and many more. We get illusion that all are working simultaneously but the fact is each of these tasks have a number of processes to it and the OPERATING SYSTEM directs each of these processes to CPU that handles only one process at a time. But as the switching speed of CPU is beyond human reception we get an illusion that all are running simultaneously.

Each process needs some energy and utilizes CPU for sometime.As CPU time is more precious for accurate functioning of the system,unnecessary and unimportant processes should not get hold of it. For this purpose Operating system does CPU scheduling in which OS gets information about what are the processes that are waiting to get executed in the CPU,what are their priorities. which process should get the CPU time now. So by doing this OS successfully manages the CPU.Sometimes a process inside CPU will go to deadlock state and will consume entire CPU time then OS catch that process and kicks out of the CPU.

If a machine (CPU) is managed in such an extra-ordinary way by human written programs then how much the human BRAIN should be managed by humans themselves? Everyday a number of thoughts hit out valuable Brain. According to Huffingtonpost we have between 50,000-70,000 thoughts per day, this means between 35 and 48 thoughts per minute per person.We are the OS for our system. Are we managing ? Are we prioritizing? Are we filtering? Are we kicking out the thought that is depressing? NO. The reason being unawareness. Then how can we be effective and achieve our goals?

Many a times we say to ourselves "I should not think about it. I should not get diverted." But by doing so we are still iterating that thought in our Brain and hence we will often fail to stop thinking about unwanted things.The solution would be Don't even think that I should not think and only think about other positive things. As I have said Brain can handle only one thing at a time, automatically the unnecessary thought will fall behind in the queue and will not get a chance to use BRAIN.

  

This is not very easy to implement (Of course writing low level program for OS is also not easy ) but one will surely master it by practice.Robin Sharma in his book The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari says that "Initially our Mind is an empty garden. We are the owner of it. It is upto us to turn it- as a beautiful one with blooming flowers and juicy fruits or a dried one with just weeds.If you decide to make it purposeful then you should take effort to protect it by guarding it"

More than often we end up in situations where we could not decide what is correct and what is wrong. What are positive thoughts, what are not. Sometimes we will not be able to even recognise that we are carried away by negative thoughts. So here is a link to Learn About – and Change – How You Think where you can find more about your way of thinking,tips and tools that are formulated after comprehensive research which will strengthen your areas of improvement.

I can give my testimony that by thinking about what we are thinking and allowing only positive and useful thoughts into your brain, you feel a sense of self-control which in-turn adds to your confidence and of course to your happiness( as we kick out the depressing thoughts).

Conclusion being simple. Appoint a guard for your precious treasure-BRAIN who allows only permitted ones inside and shoots the intruders. :) Don't forget to give good salary to the guard (self-appraisal) else he might resign :) :)

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.With our thoughts we make the world.”- Buddha